Trusting in a Prayer in the Direct Path of a Tornado

“I knew there were a possibility of severe storms that were coming, but no idea what the effect of those were going to be,” Jen said.

“You go your whole life going through bad storms, especially living in a place like Texas,” said her husband, Dan.

The forecast for Dan and Jen’s area called for severe weather, as it had the prior weekend.  Jen planned to be at home, while her husband went to weekend reserve duty five hours away.   The kids went with him to visit nearby family.

“I wasn't too worried about it,” Dan said. “I was just, ‘Okay, well, you know, it'll rain hard – the wind will blow. Okay.’"
Jen wasn’t concerned either, until soon after Dan left … then she felt a stirring in her spirit.

Jen remembers, “I heard the Lord just impart to me ‘I need you to pray over these storms.’ And so I did. I listened to that, and prayed over that and sang His praises and anointed the house. “

The next morning, Jen kept an eye on the weather reports.
Jen said, “I saw as the radar started tracking another storm coming through, I started to get a little concerned that it was getting so close.”

So she called Dan.

“I was at reserve drill on Saturday and she said, ‘You might want to look at the weather report, I'm a little concerned,’ and so I pulled it up on my phone.  And the radar was not looking good.   ‘Rotation’ is the word they used,” Dan said.

In fact, a funnel cloud had been spotted near the couple’s town.

“The last thing I wanted her was in a vehicle and a storm bearing down on top of her,” Dan said. “So I felt like the safest place was in our home.  Okay, dogs cared for - check. Flashlight - check.  Cellphone - check.”

Jen prepared while she took several more calls from concerned friends.  Then came the warning: A tornado had hit downtown Alto, just one mile from their home.
Jen said, "It was coming directly for our house.  So yeah, I started getting nervous.”

And so was Dan.  He called Jen again, who by now had crated the dogs and taken cover in their bedroom closet.  A sudden stillness came over the house.

Jen said, “You could feel that the tornado was there. You could sense that it was there without seeing out of the door.  And then I just started praying.”
“She started describing that the pressure changed and that ‘it's here,’” Dan said. “The Holy Spirit just put Psalm 91 in my mind.   I pulled it up on my phone right there while I was talking to her and I just started reading it with authority.”

Jen said, “Then that's when I heard the door smashing and the glass breaking all around me.  It wasn't just breaking, it was exploding.  And my ears were popping and the pressure changed in the entire environment.  Louder than anything was the sound of all the timber cracking around the house.  It sounded like a thousand toothpicks being snapped.”

“I could hear my house being shredded over the phone, you know?” Dan said. “And I heard my wife screaming and I heard the dogs barking.  Never have I felt so helpless in my entire life.  I was terrified.”

Jen said, “I remember just screaming ‘Jesus!’  And I can remember almost as the words came out, I was being tumbled out of the house, it was that quickly.”

Then, all Dan could hear was complete silence.

“And I was just shouting trying to get her to respond,” Dan said. “Finally – in the very faint distance I heard somebody, I think it was my wife, shouting, ‘Help.’ So at that point the hardest decision I had to make was to hang up so I could start calling people to come help us.”

Dan got a hold of friends from church, who rushed right over to try to find Jen.

“This experience put me in a position of just complete and utter vulnerability and dependency on everybody else in God's kingdom to actually come in and do things that I was just completely incapable of doing at that moment,” Dan said. “Boy, did they show up.”

Their home was demolished … but Jen was only bruised.  And the dogs were fine too.  She walked out to the road, flagged down a driver, and got to the hospital to be checked over. On the way, she used a phone to call Dan.

Dan said, “Within 20 minutes. She walked away with this with a little bump on the head and a little bit of road rash.”

The friends from church brought her home and started salvaging what they could from the wreckage.

Dan said, “Them taking care of her and being there allowed me the ability to get there and not panic for five hours straight.  We just walked up to each other, embraced, and it was just - we were whole again, you know?”

Now all settled in another home, the Comeauxes say God’s word and prayer have new meaning for them.

Jen said, “And I’ve never been more scared in my life but also more sure in my life that I was going to be protected.  The power of prayer is -- our prayers are real.  And what we say matters.”

Dan said, “He's always listening, He's always there, and He always answers and everything in the Bible is absolutely real.  He deserves every bit of praise and every bit of glory, and every bit of honor for everything He's done for me before, during and after the storm.”